Pollinator bonanza

Our honeybees have been
coming out to fly during warm spells all through March, and we started
seeing native
pollinators two
weeks ago, but Sunday was the day when the whole farm began to
buzz. Both the flowers and the insects were just waiting for the
week of cold, rainy weather to let up, and when the frost melted and
the sun came up, the honeybees almost seemed to be prying our kitchen
peach flowers open.

Fruit
tree blooms were a hit, but so were the numerous flowers in the
"lawn." Everyone loves dandelions and I also saw quite a bit of
activity around the purple dead nettles. (This guy is a
bumblebee, although I didn't brush up on my bumblebee
identification
enough to figure out his full name. Below is some sort of fly and
what might be a miner
bee.)

Nature never acts quite
the way you'd suspect, so I wasn't entirely surprised to see the
largest congregation of bees...on the manure pile! I knew that
butterflies visit manure to suck up salts (and there were both
butterflies and moths present), but I didn't realize that bees were
equally interested. Our honeybees turned up their noses at the
composted excrement, but there were at least fifty of these small bees
(miner bees again?) on the manure, along with a couple of greater
bee flies and hover
flies.

I'm glad to see that our
pollinator population is so diverse and healthy! Too bad some of
the trees they're pollinating got ahead of themselves and bloomed all
the way out before Saturday night's 27 degree freeze. I expect
moderate damage to the full-bloomed pears, barely blooming cherry, and precocious nectarine, and hardly any damage at all to the kitchen peach who valiantly held her horses until the freeze watch was past. Great job, kitchen peach!

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